A few weeks ago I introduced you to 4 different pop-up strategies, and how to leverage them to get closer to your unknown audience. I hope you learned a lot from the article and have been thinking about your own pop-up strategy ever since.
In today’s article, we’ll take a closer look at 8 different pop-ups that make people convert faster, and their different goals.
Keep in mind, though, that your pop-ups always have to provide value to your audience. Implementing pop-ups on your website that don’t deliver any kind of useful information or value to your visitors is extremely risky as it often results in your audience getting annoyed.
Let’s dive into it straight away.
1. Provide valuable insights
Your most valuable lead magnets might not be immediately visible to your audience. Use a pop-up to offer the lead magnet and capture email addresses. After this, they’ll receive an email with your content attached, and you can retarget them later on with follow-ups that could result in a sale.
It's essential to offer something that fixes their pain points or solves a specific problem.
This pop-up’s goal isn't necessarily to make direct sales, it's to offer something valuable that will keep you on top of your future customer's minds and to shift the focus towards the value of your product rather than the price. This creates trust, shows your expertise, and shows you're not just there to make sales but would like to educate your audience as well.
Another benefit is that we have a natural tendency to do something for someone that has done something for us before.
Attractive lead magnets for B2C markets could be deals, blogs, ebooks, exclusive content, or product samples. In recruitment, for example, you could push a blog that educates your audience on how to nail a job interview or what to keep in mind when writing a cv.
In B2B-focussed industries, powerful lead magnets like ebooks, whitepapers, or case studies furthermore help you position yourself as an industry expert and create trust in your brand and knowledge.
Absolute Jobs is a Belgian employment agency that has leveraged the lead capture strategy perfectly with its job alert pop-up. They have strong expertise in recruitment and a specialization in employing skilled employees for bottleneck jobs.
Absolute Jobs wanted to be able to retarget job seekers that couldn’t find the vacancy they were looking for. They launched a job alert and gave visitors multiple opportunities to subscribe to these job alerts throughout various touchpoints on the website, one of them being a pop-up.
By subscribing, visitors will receive jobs that match their skills and would be interesting for them straight to their mailboxes. This makes it easier for them to stay up-to-date with new vacancies without having to go back to the website and having to browse the jobs over and over again.
To give certain visitors an extra incentive to register for the job alert, Absolute Jobs decided to trigger a pop-up with the job registration form.
This gives their visitors a last chance to subscribe to the job alert and shows the job alert once more to visitors that might not have noticed it on the other pages.
Pop-ups aren’t only useful to keep visitors on your website, they can also help you generate a lot of extra revenue when used correctly.
2. Offer a discount
Did you know that 59% of shoppers look for discount codes before making a purchase online?
Why make it hard for them when you can target them with a discount code straight away? This will not only make their customer journey a lot simpler because they won’t have to scout the internet for a discount code. It will also often push your visitors towards an actual purchase because they might feel like they’ll lose their discount if they don’t act straight away. Another benefit of adding a discount code to a pop-up is that customers won’t have to leave your website this way, and thus are more likely to convert.
When adding a visual to your discount pop-up, try to use original visuals instead of stock images because this will give your brand a more authentic look.
Tommy Hilfiger targets its customers with a pop-up that offers 20% off their first purchase when they subscribe to their newsletter. The brand doesn’t just keep visitors on its website with this strategy, they also capture valuable information to further nurture their new customers or lead further down the sales funnel in case they won’t immediately make a purchase.
3. Get to know your visitors better
Conversational pop-ups are here to make your marketer's life a lot easier. It's often combined with a discount, but the goal is a little different.
The discount pop-up is often specifically aimed toward quickly finishing a conversion and getting your visitor to finish its purchase.
A conversational pop-up, as is in the name, is more like a conversation with your visitor. This pop-up is designed to get to know your visitor. It allows you to segment your audience and understand their needs more.
A better understanding automatically results in more targeted and relevant marketing opportunities afterward and thus being able to deliver more value to your potential customer.
Lovevery is a company that offers products and information that help create developmental experiences in the lives of new babies and their families. Lovevery helps parents feel confident that they are giving their little ones just what they want and need every step of the way.
A problem a lot of parents experience is how to keep their kids occupied and engaged. Lovevery’s pop-up promises to solve this by offering playtime ideas and tips straight to your mailbox when signing up for their newsletter. In order to give the best advice possible, they don’t just ask for your email address, they would also like to know the child’s birth date so they can already segment their audience.
The brand doesn’t just collect the age of the child but the exact birthday as well. This gives it a lot of marketing possibilities like sending birthday wishes or birthday discounts when the birthday is approaching.
Conversational pop-ups aren't only useful in e-commerce. If you're a recruitment company, you could use this kind of pop-up to get to know your possible candidates better, even though you don't have a suitable job for them right now. This kind of pop-up allows you to collect their interest, segment them and retarget them with relevant jobs that match their criteria, skills, or interests later on.
4. Recommend the right content
Narrow your visitor’s attention with a pop-up that guides them to the right product, job opening, or any conversion that might be useful to them at that specific moment and eliminate possible distractions that keep them from converting. Fight the paradox of choice by simply offering just what is relevant to someone and leading your audience to the right choice.
Recommending the right vacancies is a very effective and high-converting practice in the recruitment industry. Your visitor might have clicked a job opening on your website but doesn’t fit the requirements.
Recommending similar jobs and leading them to other relevant vacancies not only lands you a possible candidate. It also gets them to see other options that might be the right fit for them, and that they otherwise might not have found.
Unique is a Belgian recruitment and staffing company that has been active in the recruitment industry for 40 years. They are part of RGF Staffing, one of the biggest HR services providers.
Unique experienced a high bounce rate from visitors that couldn’t immediately find the jobs they were looking for. If a candidate opened a vacancy but it didn’t match their needs, they would often just close the website and continue their search elsewhere instead of going back to browse the other vacancies.
This resulted in a lot of potentially interesting candidates getting lost, and a lot of vacancies not getting the attention they deserved.
To fight this, they decided to launch a pop-up that gets triggered when someone is about to leave their website. This pop-up will show other relevant vacancies to the visitor that match his interests and the vacancy he was looking at before.
Recommending other relevant vacancies to future candidates results in 10% of the people that interact with one of the jobs, finishing the application.
If you're an e-commerce brand, another critical task your pop-up could take over from what would typically be a salesperson's job is upselling or cross-selling other products your business has to offer. Whenever someone adds something to their shopping cart, a pop-up can help you recommend other products or services that could enhance your customer’s purchase. It's very important, and I cannot stress this enough, to only offer recommendations that actually enhance someone's purchase. Don't recommend tennis shoes to someone that has just added soccer clothes to his basket for example.
5. Offer free shipping
3 out of 4 customers expect free delivery when they order something online and would abandon the checkout page if the shipping is charged. A lot of customers consider shipping costs before they even go to the checkout page at all. 65% of online customers look at free shipping before even adding items to their shopping cart. Customers not only increasingly expect free shipping, but they also expect it to be delivered quickly with 39% wanting two-day shipping to be free and 29% backing out of an order because two-day shipping wasn’t free.
Customers’ expectations have changed drastically over the last few years and they increasingly expect free delivery of their online purchases or a free alternative like picking up their order at a local store if that means they can avoid a delivery charge.
As free shipping increasingly gains more and more importance among customers globally, it’s important to communicate this quickly as a brand and to make sure you highlight your shipping policy.
If you can't offer free shipping, it might be a good idea to communicate your shipping policy so your potential customers know what the criteria are from the start instead of finding out the very last moment they're about to finish their purchase.
Another idea to tackle this is by offering free shipping in return for an email address or when buying a specific product, to name a few.
6. Remind your audience they have to finish something
Gently reminding your visitors that they have forgotten to complete their purchase or application with a pop-up, is a great way to increase your conversions.
Make the interaction easy by offering them to continue where they left off instead of making them start from scratch. Chances are they're still interested in the same thing and would like to finish that specific conversion.
A great and very effective example of the reminder pop-up can be found on Start People's website.
Start People is a Belgian recruitment and staffing company that is active in The Netherlands & France as well. They are part of RGF Staffing, one of the biggest HR services providers.
Start People experienced a high rate of unfinished application forms, resulting in a lot of potentially great candidates getting lost.
To fight this problem, they launched a pop-up that reminds candidates to finish their applications. Adding this pop-up to the website and into the customer journey, resulted in 30% of the people that get to see this pop-up completing their application.
7. Redirect customers to the right page
The internet is also called the world wide web and thus people from all over the world can end up on your website. If you’re a global brand that has multiple shops that serve different areas of the world, you might have customers that end up visiting the wrong shop.
Make sure your visitors are on the right webshop for their location by launching a pop-up that asks to confirm their location. This enables you to redirect them to the right location if necessary and makes their customer journey a lot easier because your visitor won’t have to go scout the internet to find the right webshop for his/her location.
Nike is one of the brands that do this extremely well. Being one of the biggest sports brands globally, they have different stores for each country. You immediately get a pop-up that asks if you’re in the right location and get redirected to the right page should you be on the wrong website.
This also works if your website is available in multiple languages. Simply ask your visitors if they're on the right page and allow them to switch to the right language by clicking it in the pop-up.
8. Offer time-bound incentives
One thing all of us hate is losing something. This is where time-bound pop-ups come in as a handy tool. If you want your visitors to interact quickly with you, put a timer on your offer. This will give your visitors an incentive to act quickly before their offer expires.
Bloomberg does this in an excellent manner. They trigger you with a countdown to push their subscription and make you convert quickly. As a visitor, you’ll feel like you’re running out of time because you can literally see how much time is left before your offer expires.
Are your pop-ups not converting as you want them to? Implementing some of the pop-ups above can help you create valuable pop-ups that add to your visitor’s customer journey and that they will want to interact with.
Consider different visitors in different stages whenever working with pop-ups. You could offer a bigger discount to users that aren’t as likely to convert to persuade them to share some information.
Ultimately, don’t forget to test your pop-ups because this is the most effective way to see how your audience responds and what needs to be adapted.